I got the impression that this story wanted me to be irritated at Oracle, but was left with the impression that this problem has nothing at all to do with Oracle.

Oddly, I finished the article with an improved opinion of Oracle. They were willing to change the property back because of a bug in Eclipse... That's quite a bit more give than I would have expected from Oracle.

Of course, it might have been wise PR as the problem only showed up after updating the JDK. It would have been easy for developers to blame the wrong party.

Yeah, the title made it look like Oracle did something sneaky and caused a problem. The problem was someone writing code that was very, very far away from "write once, run anywhere".

Anybody who still believes in "write once, run anywhere" has never tried deploying to multiple platforms. "Write once, debug everywhere" is more like it, which is why Eclipse has some weird property check that is Windows only in the first place.

That said, the JVM is probably the best environment for doing cross-platform deployment.

I wonder how much this must have been already boning people over before who were using OpenJDK (or other JDKs bug for bug compatible with the Sun JDK but without the Sun string).